Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The Worst Science Books

Over at Uncommon Descent, Denyse O'Leary, the world's worst journalist™, gives us a list of her favorite science books --- in her usual barely literate style. (Note to Denyse: the plural of "coo" is not "coo's".)

No surprise, three of them aren't written by scientists: Darwin on Trial, Signature in the Cell, and Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution. Of the other two, one was written by a very mediocre scientist who made basic mistakes in previous books, and the other by a man whose bogus claims were repudiated by his own department. In Denyse's topsy-turvy world, actual scientists can be dismissed as "mooches and tax burdens", or "British aristocrats".

The late Martin Gardner studied this kind of crankery and knew how to recognize it. A scientific crank, Gardner said, "has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories." It is not possible to reason with this kind of idiocy -- ridicule is the best response.

Actually, Denyse's list would be a good start on a list of the Worst Science Books. Do you have any more nominations? I'll start with Judith Hooper's Of Moths and Men, Arthur Koestler's The Case of the Midwife Toad, and anything by Jeremy Rifkin.

Oh, I'm curious about the last one: could you explain (maybe in a new post, someday?) why do you dislike Rifkin's work so much?I'm definitely not an expert on energy matters, and I have only read some newspaper articles (not his "science books"), but I did not get SUCH a bad impression... so I am genuinely asking for your point of view about this.

I also have in PDF form, Kent Hovind's PhD Thesis. I have not been able to read it all, as evidenced by the fact that I haven't pulled out my own fingernails to relieve the pain, but if that counts as a science book...

I also wanted to talk about O'Leary. I'm so glad you brought up how bad a writer she is. I disagree with lots of people, and all of the creationists of her stripe, but most of them can write a reasonable paragraph that I can follow. Even Kent Hovind, mentioned above, can do this. His ideas are muddy, his thinking absurd and childish, but the structure of his language is clear.

At least a third of the articles O'Leary writes baffle me, in that there are entire paragraphs or groups of paragraphs where I can't figure out what she's saying. I've heard her speak and she's not nearly so incomprehensible in speech, so it seems to be a writing problem, which is amazing for a professional writer.

Mind you I'm not saying her thoughts are without flaw while speaking, it's just that I can understand most of what she's saying.

Although not technically a science book, David Berlinksi's "A Tour of the Calculus" ranks as #1 on my list of the worst books I've ever read*. Pompous, turgid, and self-congratulatory are just a few of the descriptors that come to mind.

"Although not technically a science book, David Berlinksi's "A Tour of the Calculus" ranks as #1 on my list of the worst books I've ever read*. Pompous, turgid, and self-congratulatory are just a few of the descriptors that come to mind."

Note to progressives and greens: I got The Corporation documentary from Netflix. I'm a pretty unrepentant capitalist but I thought, okay, I'll give this a chance. I was paying attention and thinking about it until Jeremy Rifkin appeared on the scren. Instant credibility-killer. Sorry guys, I'm willing to listen to the arguments of people who have an opposing point of view as long as they have, you know, arguments.

Fitjof Capra's "The Tao of Physics" and Gary Zukav's "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" are terribly embarrassing, to this student of Indian Philosophy. Zukav isn't a scientist, but Capra used to be one, and what a fall! Any book written by scientists in their dotage are cringeworthy. E.O.Wilson's Consilience is yucky, with its cavalier treatment of ideas in other sciences - and its talk about how we are close to finding the deep interconnected substructure of the cosmos! Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions also earns my ire for doing for science what the heroic/God-inspired-people/traditional-values school of thought did for history for all of time until recently. Kuhn's book needs to be countered with something like a "People's History of the US" and the word paradigm excised from our vocabulary.

That is exactly what I was talking about with being unable to follow O'Leary. Sometimes it's just a tortured sentence that I can't unpack, and sometimes it just seems to be a phrase or description (or anecdote) that seems to be from an entirely different article that she's plunked down for no reason.

I can see her trying to be the kind of clever writer who invents a new moniker for someone, or a new descriptive meme, or something along those lines. But instead it just seems like occasionally a context-free paragraph just issues forth from her keyboard.